Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: A wronged man spends twelve years preparing his revenge, gets every enemy he has into his power in a single afternoon, and chooses to forgive them. The play asks what that choice costs, whether it works, and whether the forgiven deserve it.
- Key Characters: Prospero, Alonso, Antonio, Ariel, Caliban, Gonzalo, Ferdinand.
- The Core Tension: Prospero forgives, but only after he has made his enemies suffer, and one of them never asks to be forgiven. The play sets mercy against justice and lets the audience decide whether the mercy is complete.
- Key Manifestations: Prospero’s account of the coup and the rotten boat (A1S2); Caliban’s curses and his murder plot (A1S2, A3S2); the harpy’s judgement on the three men of sin (A3S3); "the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance" (A5S1); the forgiveness of Antonio, Alonso’s resignation and the reunion (A5S1); the Epilogue’s plea for pardon.
- Famous Quote:
"Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance..."
(Act 5, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Alonso repents and is given back his son. Antonio is forgiven and says nothing. Caliban is sent to seek for grace. Prospero, who forgave them all, ends by asking the audience to forgive him.
Twelve Years of Waiting
The wrong comes first, and the play makes sure the audience feels it. In Act 1 Prospero tells Miranda how his brother took Milan with an army from Naples, and what was done with the deposed duke and his three-year-old daughter.
Original
In few, they hurried us aboard a bark,
Bore us some leagues to sea; where they prepared
A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigged,
Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats
Instinctively had quit it...
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
In short, they hurried us aboard a boat,
And took us several miles out to sea, where
A rotting boat was waiting, without rigging,
Nor ropes, nor sails, nor mast. Even the rats
Instinctively had jumped ship.
A boat the rats had abandoned, without rigging or sail, and a father and child put in it to drown. The play never lets this be forgotten, and it does not soften it. Antonio intended his brother and niece to die at sea; that they did not is owed to Gonzalo’s charity and, as Prospero says, to Providence. Everything Prospero does on the island is done by a man who has had twelve years to think about that boat.
What is striking is how little the play lets him enjoy the thought. He tells the story in fury, interrupting himself to make sure Miranda is listening, and then, when she asks why he raised the storm, he answers in terms of stars and fortune, not revenge. The theme of power and control is what the audience sees Prospero exercise; what he wants to do with it is kept from us, and perhaps from him, until Act 5.
The Powers, Delaying, Not Forgetting
The revenge, when it comes, is a performance. Ariel, as a harpy, makes the banquet vanish in front of the starving court and delivers a judgement that Prospero has written for him. It is addressed to three men, and it names their crime.
Original
But remember –
For that's my business to you – that you three
From Milan did supplant good Prospero;
Exposed unto the sea, which hath requit it,
Him and his innocent child: for which foul deed
The powers, delaying, not forgetting, have
Incensed the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures,
Against your peace.
(Ariel, Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But you must remember –
And that’s the reason that I’m here – that you three
In Milan overthrew good Prospero,
And left him to the oceans – much like you’ve been –
Along with his defenceless child. For that crime,
The powers that be – who’d waited, not forgetting –
Fired up an angry sea and all its creatures
To break your peace.
"Delaying, not forgetting" is the play’s theory of justice in three words. The powers have waited twelve years, as Prospero has, and the storm is the debt being called in. The speech makes the private grievance sound like the will of heaven, which is what a good revenger always claims, and which in this case happens to be staged by a magician standing above the scene.
The effect on the three men divides them. Alonso hears his crime in the thunder and goes to drown himself; Antonio and Sebastian draw their swords on the air. It is the moment the play separates the enemy who can be forgiven from the ones who cannot, and it does it by watching how each of them receives an accusation that is true. The theme of illusion and reality serves the theme of judgement here: the harpy is a trick, and the guilt it exposes is real.
Heart-Sorrow and a Clear Life
The harpy’s speech ends with a condition. Lingering perdition will follow the three men unless they find the one thing that can guard them from it, and the thing is named.
Original
is nothing but heart-sorrow
And a clear life ensuing.
(Ariel, Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
is no less than remorse
And living kind and morally from now on.
Sorrow of heart and a clean life afterwards: repentance and reform. This is the price of forgiveness, set out before the forgiveness is offered, and only one of the three men pays it. Alonso, who has already lost his son, finds the heart-sorrow at once. Antonio and Sebastian, who have lost nothing, find only fear, and fear passes.
Gonzalo, watching the three of them run off, diagnoses what has happened: their great guilt, like a poison given to work a great time after, has begun to bite. It is the play’s clearest account of conscience as something that arrives late and only when the body is worn down enough to feel it. The theme of nature and nurture sits underneath this. The play seems to believe that remorse can be induced in some natures and not in others, and it is honest that it does not know why.
I Do Forgive Thee
The forgiveness itself is delivered to men who cannot hear it. Prospero stands over the charmed court in Act 5 and addresses each of them in turn while they are still senseless; the speech is for the audience, and it is not gentle.
Original
Most cruelly
Didst thou, Alonso, use me and my daughter:
Thy brother was a furtherer in the act.
Thou art pinched for’t now, Sebastian. Flesh and blood...
(Prospero, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Very cruelly
Did you, Alonso, use me and my daughter:
Your brother also helped you in the act.
You’re highly bruised, Sebastian. My kinsman...
Cruelty named, complicity named, pain acknowledged as deserved; and then, to Antonio, forgiveness, "unnatural though thou art". The play does not pretend that forgiving is the same as forgetting or liking. Prospero forgives his brother in the same breath that he says calling him brother would infect his mouth, and demands the dukedom back in the sentence after.
When the court wakes, the pattern repeats in public. Alonso gives back Milan and asks pardon before he is sure Prospero is real; Gonzalo is embraced; Antonio is forgiven again and says nothing, then or ever. The theme of revenge and forgiveness is resolved by Prospero’s choice, but the play is scrupulous about what the choice does and does not achieve. It restores a dukedom and reunites a father and son. It does not make Antonio sorry.
"the punishment of guilt, and the final happiness of the pair for whom our passions and reason are equally interested"
— Samuel Johnson, Notes on The Tempest, in The Plays of William Shakespeare, 1765
Key Quotes on Revenge and Forgiveness
Quote 1
Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,
Or cut his wezand with thy knife.
(Caliban, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You’ll smash his skull, or stab him with a spear,
Or cut his windpipe with your knife.
Quote Analysis: Caliban’s revenge, planned aloud for Stephano. Prospero sleeps in the afternoon; take his books, then a log, a stake or a knife. The play has a second revenge plot running under the first, and it is the crude mirror of Prospero’s own: a dispossessed native, twelve years of grievance, and a plan to strike while the enemy sleeps. Caliban never gets his revenge, because Prospero foresees it. Prospero gets his and declines to take it. The play sets the two side by side and does not say that the difference is virtue.
But, O, how oddly will it sound that I
Must ask my child forgiveness!
(Alonso, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But, oh, how strange it’s going to sound when I
Must ask my child forgiveness!
Quote Analysis: Alonso, discovering that the girl at the chessboard is Prospero’s daughter and his son’s betrothed. The king who helped depose a duke must now ask that duke’s child to forgive him, and he hears how strange it sounds. It is the play’s most complete repentance, and it is stopped by Prospero, who tells him not to burden their memory with a heaviness that is gone. Forgiveness in this scene is not a speech but a refusal to hear the apology through. Alonso has already given the dukedom back; that was the apology.
There, sir, stop:
Let us not burthen our remembrance with
A heaviness that's gone.
(Prospero, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Stop there, sir:
We must not burden all our memories with
The sadness of the past.
Quote Analysis: Prospero cutting Alonso off. The line is the counterpart to the harpy’s "delaying, not forgetting": what was to be remembered for twelve years is now to be put down in a sentence. It is easy to hear it as generosity, and it is; but it is also the voice of a man who has decided the subject is closed and is closing it. Prospero forgives the way he does everything else, by command, and the play lets the audience notice that even his mercy has the shape of control.
That if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become tender.
(Ariel, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
That if you saw them, all your feelings would
Become considerate.
Quote Analysis: Ariel, describing the prisoners in the lime-grove, and adding what nobody asked him for: that Prospero’s feelings would soften if he saw them. Prospero asks whether he really thinks so; Ariel says his own would, were he human. It is the hinge of the play. The decision to forgive is prompted not by conscience, religion or Gonzalo’s tears but by a spirit made of air telling a man what a man ought to feel. The rarer action follows within six lines.
Key Takeaways
- The Wrong Is Real: A father and child in a boat the rats had left. The play never softens what Antonio did, and Prospero has had twelve years to think about it.
- Judgement as Performance: The harpy's accusation is true and its authority is staged. Prospero writes the will of heaven and Ariel delivers it.
- Only One Pays the Price: Heart-sorrow and a clear life are the condition of pardon. Alonso finds them; Antonio and Sebastian find fear, which passes.
- Forgiveness Is Not Reconciliation: Prospero forgives his brother in the breath that says naming him would infect his mouth. Antonio never answers.
Study Questions and Analysis
Does Prospero truly forgive his enemies, or only defeat them?
Both, and the play makes the second visible inside the first. The forgiveness of Antonio is unconditional in its words and immediately followed by a demand:
Thy rankest fault; all of them; and require
My dukedom of thee, which perforce, I know,
Thou must restore.
(Prospero, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The awful things you’ve done; but now I need
My dukedom back from you, which you’re compelled
To give to me.
All the faults are forgiven, and the dukedom must be returned. Then, to Antonio and Sebastian together, Prospero adds that he could expose their plot against the king and will not, for now. The pardoned men leave the island knowing that their pardoner holds evidence that could hang them. That is mercy, and it is also a leash.
Stephen Orgel’s Oxford edition (1987) read the final act as a political settlement rather than a private reconciliation: Milan restored, Naples bound to it by marriage, the dangerous men neutralised, and nobody required to be sorry. Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), went further and called the forgiveness a failure, since the unrepentant lords will plot again the moment they are home. E. M. W. Tillyard, in Shakespeare’s Last Plays (1938), took the other view: the pattern of the late plays is destruction followed by regeneration, and Prospero’s choice of virtue over vengeance is the regeneration, whatever Antonio thinks of it. The play supports Tillyard on Alonso and Kott on Antonio, and that is probably the point.
Why does Alonso repent when Antonio and Sebastian do not?
Because Alonso has lost something and the others have not. The harpy speaks to all three, but it speaks to Alonso personally, telling him that his son was taken for his crime, and grief has already prepared him to believe it. Antonio and Sebastian have nothing to lose but their lives, and their response is to fight:
SEBASTIAN: But one fiend at a time,
I'll fight their legions o'er.
ANTONIO: I'll be thy second.
(Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
SEBASTIAN: One devil at a time,
I’ll fight through all their army.
ANTONIO: I’ll support you.
Two men drawing on legions of fiends is comic and also exact. Fear is not remorse, and the play knows the difference. Alonso goes to drown himself beside his son; the other two run off to fight spirits, and in the next scene are planning the murder again.
Frank Kermode (1954) read Antonio and Sebastian as the play’s figures for a nature that art can restrain but not convert, and Alonso as the proof that some natures can be reached. Jan Kott (1964) saw in the pair the sign that Prospero’s experiment has failed: history repeats, and the men who have been shown mercy have learned nothing from it. The play gives Alonso the whole of Act 5’s repentance and gives Antonio one line, a joke about selling Caliban. Students should resist the temptation to explain the difference by character alone. It is also a matter of what each man had to lose, and the play is honest that remorse comes easier to the bereaved.
What is the role of the harpy in Act 3, Scene 3?
The harpy is the play’s instrument of judgement, and it is a piece of theatre. Ariel descends in the shape of a monster from Virgil, a bird with a woman’s face that fouls the food of the men it visits, makes the banquet vanish, and tells the three men of sin why they are on the island. When they draw their swords, he tells them what they are fighting:
You fools! I and my fellows
Are ministers of Fate...
(Ariel, Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You fools! I and my fellow beings
Enact what Fate decrees...
The speech turns Prospero’s grievance into the will of heaven, and it works: Alonso hears his crime in the thunder. But the audience has watched Prospero arrange it, and hears him afterwards congratulate Ariel on how well the figure of the harpy was performed. Judgement in The Tempest is real in its effects and staged in its means.
The scene comes from the third book of the Aeneid, where harpies snatch the Trojans’ food and a harpy prophesies their sufferings, and editors since Frank Kermode (1954) have traced the parallel: Alonso’s court, sailing from Carthage to Italy, is being made to relive Aeneas’s voyage. E. M. W. Tillyard (1938) read the harpy as the destruction phase of the late-play pattern, the point at which the guilty are broken so that they can be remade. What the scene decides, for the play’s treatment of revenge and forgiveness, is that the revenge has already happened. By the time Prospero chooses mercy in Act 5, his enemies have been terrified, accused and driven mad. He forgives them after the punishment, not instead of it.
Is the ending of The Tempest a true reconciliation?
Gonzalo thinks so, and gives the ending its official summary: everyone has found what they were looking for, and all of them found themselves when no man was his own. He starts from the strangest fact of the day:
Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue
Should become kings of Naples? O, rejoice...
(Gonzalo, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Now was the Duke of Milan thrust from Milan
So that his heirs be kings of Naples? Oh, joy...
The wrong done to Prospero has produced, by the long way round, a marriage that joins the two states. It is the shape of a romance, and Gonzalo reads it as Providence. But his list leaves out Antonio, who is standing beside him, and Sebastian, and the audience has just heard Prospero tell those two that he is keeping their secret for now.
Anne Barton, in her New Penguin introduction (1968), noticed how much the play declines to resolve and how briskly it hurries past what it cannot: Antonio’s silence, Caliban’s future, the king’s unanswered questions. Northrop Frye, in his introduction of 1959, read the ending as the emergence of a renewed society, the standard close of Shakespearean comedy, with the marriage as its sign. Stephen Orgel (1987) called it a restoration of political order rather than a reconciliation of people. All three are describing the same scene. What they disagree about is whether a settlement in which one party stays silent counts as peace, and the play, which gives Antonio the silence, seems to want the question asked.
Why does Prospero punish Alonso through grief rather than force?
Because grief can change a man and force cannot. Prospero has Alonso entirely in his power from the first scene; he could have had him drowned, or charmed into a grove for the rest of his life. Instead he separates him from Ferdinand, lets him believe for three days that his son is dead, and then, when they meet, tells him a matching lie:
As great to me as late; and, supportable
To make the dear loss, have I means much weaker
Than you may call to comfort you, for I
Have lost my daughter.
(Prospero, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
As great, also as recent, to me; and
To make my loss more painful, I have fewer
Sources of help to comfort me, for I
Have lost my daughter.
Prospero has not lost Miranda; he has given her to Ferdinand. But the claim puts the two fathers on a level, and Alonso’s response, to wish the two children alive and married in Naples, is the wish Prospero has been waiting to hear. The cell opens, and the wish is granted.
E. M. W. Tillyard (1938) saw this as the engine of all the late plays: a loss believed final, endured long enough to change the sufferer, and then reversed. Northrop Frye (1959) described the same movement as the low point from which comedy rebuilds. What is unusual in The Tempest is that the loss is staged by a character inside the play, deliberately, as a cure. Prospero does to Alonso what the plot of The Winter’s Tale does to Leontes, and he does it on purpose. The theme of illusion and reality is put to moral use: the king is deceived so that he can be made good, and the play seems to think the deception was worth it.
How does The Tempest treat revenge differently from Hamlet?
Hamlet is a play about a man who cannot bring himself to take a revenge he has been commanded to take. The Tempest is a play about a man who has arranged his revenge perfectly and then declines it. Prospero’s position at the end of Act 3 is the one Hamlet never reaches:
My high charms work
And these mine enemies are all knit up
In their distractions; they now are in my power...
(Prospero, Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Now, all my spells are working
And all my enemies are self-consumed
And mystified; they’re under my control now...
Every enemy helpless, and the revenger in full control of what happens next. Hamlet with Claudius at prayer is the nearest parallel, and Hamlet talks himself out of striking because the moment is not bad enough for his uncle. Prospero talks himself out of striking because a spirit reminds him what a human being feels. The two plays put the same choice in front of two men and get opposite answers.
Jan Kott (1964) read The Tempest as the darker play, because Hamlet at least believes that justice is possible and Prospero, on Kott’s reading, has learned that it is not: he forgives because revenge would change nothing. G. Wilson Knight’s The Crown of Life (1947) read it as the brighter, the tragedies’ pattern of destruction finally answered by a play in which the destroyer stops. The difference between the two heroes is also a difference of age. Hamlet is a student; Prospero is a father with a daughter to settle and a grave to think about, and his forgiveness is the act of a man who wants to go home.
What does the Epilogue add to the theme of forgiveness?
It turns the theme on the audience. Prospero has spent Act 5 pardoning; in the Epilogue he stands with no magic and asks to be pardoned himself. The last couplet makes the exchange explicit:
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
(Prospero, Epilogue)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
As from your wrongs you’d pardoned be,
Now let your kindness set me free.
It is the language of the Lord’s Prayer, forgive us as we forgive, and it asks the audience to do for Prospero what he has just done for Antonio: release a man who is at their mercy. The applause is the pardon. A play about forgiveness ends by making the theatre practise it.
W. H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror (1944) begins where the Epilogue ends, with Prospero off the stage and talking to Ariel about what he has done, as if the plea for release had been granted and the man now had to live with himself. Frank Kermode (1954) read the Epilogue in the tradition of the actor’s appeal for applause, made unusual by the fact that Prospero’s "project" was also the play’s. Whether the lines are Shakespeare’s own farewell or only Prospero’s is the old question, and it does not need answering here. What the Epilogue settles is that forgiveness in The Tempest is not something the powerful hand down. It is something everyone needs, including the man who had the book.
